New-Tech Europe Magazine | August 2016 | Digital edition

Dinner in 3D We’re all accustomed to having appliances on our kitchen counters, from toasters and blenders to coffee makers and microwaves. If Mechanical Engineering Professor Hod Lipson has his way, we’ll soon need to make room for one more - a 3D food printer that could revolutionize the way we think about food and prepare it. Over the past year, Lipson and his students have been developing a 3D food printer that can fabricate edible items through computer-guided software and the actual cooking of edible pastes, gels, powders, and liquid ingredients - all in a prototype that looks like an elegant coffee machine. The printer is the result of a design project devised by Lipson and his students, led by Drim Stokhuijzen, an industrial design graduate student visiting from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, and Jerson Mezquita, an undergraduate student visiting from SUNY Maritime who is now a research associate in Lipson’s Creative Machines Lab (CML). “Food printers are not meant to replace conventional cooking - they won’t solve all of our nutritional needs, nor cook everything we should eat,” says Lipson, a pioneering roboticist who works in the areas of artificial intelligence and digital manufacturing. “But they will produce an infinite variety of customized fresh, nutritional foods on demand, transforming digital recipes and basic ingredients supplied in frozen cartridges into healthy dishes that can supplement our daily intake. I think this is the missing link that will bring the benefits of personalized data-driven health to our kitchen tables - it’s the ‘killer app’ of 3D printing.” Lipson’s 3D printer - Image courtesy of Timothy Lee Photographers Lipson’s team, who also includes PhD student Joni

Mici and undergrad Yadir Lakehal, has been working nonstop to get the prototype up and running - the major challenge is getting the printer to “cook” the food. Lipson notes that, while he is sure they can get the technology to work this summer, “stuffing it all into the new machine, which is much more compact than the printer we’ve been using, is a big challenge.” The printer is fitted out with a robotic arm that holds eight slots for frozen food cartridges; the students are now working on incorporating an infrared heating element into the arm. Lipson, a member of Columbia’s Data Science Institute, sees 3D printing as a universal technology that has the potential to revolutionize lives by enabling us to design and manufacture things with unprecedented freedom. Instrumental in advancing 3D printing for more than 20 years, Lipson was one of the first researchers to work on multi-material printing, first printing electromechanical systems and moving on to bioprinting. Printing biomaterials led him to printing food, which he says is an especially exciting area: “It touches on something that’s very basic to our lives. We’ve been cooking forever, but if you think about it, while technology and software have wormed their way into almost every aspect of our lives, cooking is still very, very primitive - we still cook over an open flame, like our ancestors millennia ago. So this is one area where software has not yet permeated. And when software touches something, it takes off.” Taking off to the kitchen, Lipson and his team are collaborating with New York City-based International Culinary Center (ICC), a top culinary school in the U.S. Working closely with Chef Hervé Malivert, ICC’s director of food technology and culinary coordinator, Lipson led several workshops to bring together ICC’s culinary creativity with the CML’s technical knowledge to create new kinds of foods - novel textures, combinations, and spatial arrangements of basic ingredients that chefs cannot currently put together. Malivert hoped to expose his students to the future of food and new food technologies; Lipson’s aim was to explore and study the potential of printed food, to create and document the

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